Such fantastic news! Slightly bittersweet knowing that the end is now in place but if any show deserved to go out on it's own terms (since LOST anyway) it's Fringe! Can't wait for the finale of the season now that I know it's not the last I'm going to see Fringe Division in action.

Sorry, very very happy here to see Fringe be able to finish up its season, but I'm part of the group that still has not forgiven Fox for canceling FF and still wants to see the execs who did it pulled from their cars, dragged to San Diego, and after being tarred & feathered, are forced to dance in front of everyone at Comic Con while apologizing for their grave mistake.

Oh! And while they're dancing we get to throw rotten fruit and tiny pickles at them.

Personally I think you can thank Kevin Reilly for this, Ninjaka! He has really proven to be a positive force at FOX. There was no way that the old regime would have granted season four, let alone season five. Although he had already proven himself to me when he allowed Dollhouse a second chance. That definitely would never have happened before he took over.

Kinda feels like Angel taking over Wolfram and Hart, don't you think? ;)

I'm REALLY happy they are getting a chance to wrap things up properly...

But I'm very sad because I'm seriously addicted to Anna Torv. I don't know what it is but I could spend all day watching her watch paint dry and be completely enthralled.

Plus I will really miss John Noble. Walter Bishop is one of the most interesting and entertaining characters on televsion today. I hope Noble gets another gig that's at least close to being as delightful as Bishop.

Fantastic news. Finales are so much better when they are meant to be finales, and it is great that 'Fringe' is going to be allowed to come to an end the way the writers want it to. Although I wish that 'Firefly' and 'Dollhouse', and to a lesser extent 'Angel', had continued for many more seasons than the networks allowed them to, I am grateful that they were able to come to a proper ending, even if for 'Firefly' that had to be in a film rather than a series finale.

My favourite series finales of all time are those of 'Angel' and 'Lost', and I hope 'Fringe' is going to be up there as well. If it ends at the same standard that it has been going at lately, as I hope it will, then we should be in store for an incredible ending to an incredible show.

Woot! alt-alittlebitbison is doing the dance of joy on the bridge between dimensions! :D

@Five Horizons: you called it first dude!

@Ninjaka:

"Sorry, very very happy here to see Fringe be able to finish up its season, but I'm part of the group that still has not forgiven Fox for canceling FF and still wants to see the execs who did it pulled from their cars, dragged to San Diego, and after being tarred & feathered, are forced to dance in front of everyone at Comic Con while apologizing for their grave mistake.

Oh! And while they're dancing we get to throw rotten fruit and tiny pickles at them. "

Count me in! But it's good to see that things can improve, even at Fox.

If I had a serious science fiction show I would definitely want to pitch it to FOX. They have been treating the genre better than anyone as of late. There is no good financial/business reason for FOX to order another season of Fringe. None. This is out of love. The (much maligned and totally different) execs at FOX love Fringe.

Well, FOX execs over the years have made some dumbass decisions. But, factually, they supported Fringe to 100 episodes (syndication), they renewed Dollhouse despite it being the lowest rated show on any major network, and kept Terminator around for, frankly, a wacky amount of time. When you look back at last season, they cancelled the least amount of shows out of any network. They're also one of the only networks that spends actual money on sci-fi shows.

Yes. That helped. It got to the point where I thought Fox were trying to kill off Dollhouse through stealth. I still maintain that the network had no intention of giving the show a third series. It wasn't what they wanted and it got a second series to avoid flack. And then they quietly buried it with the two-episode burnoff slots.

Warner Brothers benefits from the possible syndication sale. FOX gets nothing from that other than what is probably a ridiculously cheap license fee for the 13 episode 5th season. The only real winners in this situation are the hundreds of people who get to keep their jobs for another season and the fans.

Honestly, my take - I think 20th thought the DVDs would sell like Firefly due to unair episodes, so they heavily discounted the show for FOX. It didn't sell well on DVD. So then FOX basically forgot about it, gave it no publicity budget or time, and burnt it off double 'sodes. I'm grateful they kept it around as the writers really took it to a whole new place, but it did kind of feel like all this effort they made wasn't actually going to keep them around. That advert the 2nd week with the comedy voiceover with "Til Death" basically said it all.

Fringe is awesome to watch on DVD. That being said, I am glad the show, like "Chuck" will give fans closure. How are people not pointing out the similarities between this show and "Chuck's" fifth season deal with NBC? It allows the creators to go out on their terms, as opposed to the network saying the ratings never justified the show seeing a season four, let alone a season five.

I do appreciate that networks have become more creative with solving these problems with ratings-deprived shows. Things like these shorter, 13-episode wrap-up seasons, or when NBC sold first-run Friday Night Lights to DirecTV in exchange for some of the production costs being covered... I suspect it hurts them in the short term (if only by not allowing them to put a potential higher-ratings earner in its place), but I hope that it pays off in the long-term by getting people to trust network TV.

These aren't spoilers so much as speculation based on what little we know so far, so take what I'm about to say with a pinch of salt, but the way I think it's going to play out is that the alt-universe plot will be resolved by the end of season four. I'm assuming that as they had to plan for a certain amount of closure should season five not happen and so leaving that open would have been unthinkable.

Season five will then be about discovering the Observers were behind the whole war between universes thing and the reasons behind it. Then we'll have a set up that involves the story going between present day and the future that we saw last week, possibly with present day Olivia eventually ending up with Peter and Walter in that future to help defeat the Observers once and for all. Total speculation but that's pretty much where I see the story heading. As such, still plenty of Anna Torv to be had, which can only be a good thing!